Reaper Video Editing and Rendering Options- Beginner Tutorial

The audio sample rate is 48 KHz, stereo and the frame rate 25fps. The audio decoded in MP3 stereo at 64 kb/s. It also has bigger video size at 720 x 576.

Very Basic Video Editing – Selecting and Cutting Videos

One of the most important editing tasks is to cut or select just a portion of the video so that it will have a manageable file size.

This can be done in Reaper. The good thing is that you have full control of the audio although currently it lacks more video editing tools present in standard video editing software. Below are the steps:

1.) Launch Reaper and insert the video. 2.) You can view the video in sync with the audio by going to “View” – “Video Window”.

3.) Move the cursor/timeline bar to 0:00:00 (start). 4.) Hit the Reaper play button. You should now be watching the video with synchronized audio.

5.) Select the portion of the video where you would like to edit/extract. You can use your mouse then left click- hold the time section from a selected start to end. This will highlight it into white gray regions:

Selected video regions

6.) Now you have selected a specific region of the video, go to File – Render. Set the following:

a.) Under “Render bounds” select “Time selection”. b.) Specify an output directory and filename. c.) Sample rate – this should be the same with the original audio sample rate. If it’s 48000Hz, then set 48000Hz under sample rate (more examples below). d.) Channels – if the original audio source is stereo, then also set stereo in the rendering options.

For best results, set all properties to be the same with the original video properties. This cannot be set exactly in some situations but at least it should be very similar to the original source. The objective is to retain the original video quality as much as possible. If it’s an AVI video, select AVI as well as the size. For example, below are the video properties of the original source:

And the Reaper video render settings for the above properties would be:

Video render settings in Reaper

As you have noticed, the properties such as sample rate, format, video size, fps, audio codec and bit rates are set to be the same as the original source.

7.) Finally hit the render button, wait until the rendering is complete. Try watching the edited/rendered video in VLC or Windows media player to see if it’s correct. You can experiment further with the render settings to tweak something in case of no video output.